Tagged: support

This short post is just an idea I want to throw out their into the aether for someone/anyone to chew on.

Being diagnosed with Parkinson’s throws an individual into a hypothetical ‘foreign land’, where people (doctors and members of the affected community) talk in a strange new dialect about medication, brain chemicals called dopamine and accumulation of proteins that sound like distant galaxies (‘alpha synuclein‘).

The diagnosed individual has to adapt their lives to this new reality in order to get by. They are analogous to a refugee (bad analogy I appreciate, but bare with me – I’m going somewhere with this). Many fantastic support groups are available to help make that adjustment easier. But what happens when that individual wants to get involved with the research being conducted on the condition?

Efforts are being made in this direction, but we can always do better.

In today’s post I would like to discuss/explore an idea that deals with involving the Parkinson’s community in the research side of things, and has the goal of making the research more ‘patient-centric’.

When a refugee moves to a new country, it is an overwhelming experience.

Can you imagine leaving the mountain village that you have lived in your whole life – everything that is normal for you – and moving to some strange, big western city. Being exposed to a new culture, new societal expectations, new eco system, new prejudices, new everything. It must be a shock to the entire system.

If you speak the local language, great. You should be able to make do and get by with a bit of effort. But in order to truly integrate into the new community, you will still need a lot of support.

I was recently talking with a man who was a refugee and he had moved to Canada five years ago.

He was originally from central Asia, and he talked at length about the hardships of the whole process. Even though his new home in North America was vastly more comfortable than his previous situation, he had still found the whole process extremely tiring and disorientating.

What stuck with me from that conversation, however, was that he could not say enough good things about the Canadian system of integration. He was extremely grateful for everything that they had done for him to help him insert himself into Canadian society. He was particularly impressed with the ‘Groups of Five‘ programme.